VisCom Outdoor

VisCom Outdoor has been in the outdoor business for 13 years. We started utilizing billboards in our restaurant “Dingus McGee’s” located in a small town on the I-80 corridor between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe / Reno, NV. Interstate 80 is the main artery for local traffic between the San Francisco Bay Area and Reno, NV. It is also the gateway to the majority of interstate traffic emanating from the west coast.

We were in business one full year and struggling in 1975. We started our business with a particularly small sum of $18,000 between us. Even in 1974 that was a measly amount of money to open a roadhouse restaurant of any merit. Well, we were a good, sufficiently large restaurant that could accommodate many guests. We clearly almost went out of business on the third month as we really had no reserves to address restaurant related issues. In fact, we opened with less than $4.00 in the bank. We had a huge opening night and had hired and trained a huge staff to accommodate our expectations. Well, we learned within a very short period that our hopes and expectations were not justified. We did not need 35 employees. We quickly went down to 8 employees including the original three partners… Dingus, Denny and Bob.

Our landlord, Stewart Wells, finally encouraged us to obtain a billboard to assist us in getting our name out. Well, inside of one year our business had doubled. We went from one billboard to 7 and utilized them for approximately 12 years. One day my partner and myself said to one another “Hey we are pretty well known and really should not have to spend this kind of money each month to remind people to stop here. So, let’s put the money we are spending on advertising back into the operation of the restaurant and ultimately into profits. Well, within one year our business had declined from a high of nearly $2 million, to just $1.2 million. Within one more year our business was down to less than $1 million and… not much else had changed except our marketing. Once we lost our market edge and people’s habits changed we had a very difficult time getting it back and, in fact, never did. Our food was better than ever, but we just could not regain market dominance on the I-80 corridor. After 22 years of good success we sold the business and began the billboards business.

This business and this product works. It works astonishingly well. It does however require a well thought out and well implemented plan with a realistic budget and some measurement standards to properly gather the data to evaluate your success… which you should be doing with any marketing effort. VisCom Outdoor does exactly that… we will help you build and execute a good billboard program that will deliver results.

Scope

Northern California & Northern Nevada is home base and the base of the majority of the inventory we represent. However, National billboard representation and acquisition is also what we do very well.